Thursday, December 24, 2009

A burial ground of cultures, Not just hot air – Himal Southasian zindabad,

Jawed Naqvi'slaments in A burial ground of cultures:*It is difficult of course to say whether hosting a reception at the haveli was a quirkier aberration of the arriving mores than the grabbing of precious land from a vulnerable Mumbai waqf board for a song, to build a tycoon’s house on it. How then shall we account for the fact that the Urdu poet’s small mausoleum in the Nizamuddin district of New Delhi built privately by a Parsi moviemaker, who deified the legendary Ghalib, is today cluttered with animal refuse.* If filth and squalor is a natural state of being for most of those who live in the vicinity of the Ghalib shrine — and they happen to be Muslims, who can read or write his script but not quite keep up with his profoundly eclectic worldview — then we have to step back and see what has happened elsewhere. Mir Taqi Mir’s grave lies under a railway track in Lucknow. Wali Dakhani’s shrine in Ahmedabad was razed as an expression of resurgent cultural nationalism. A metalled road now passes over it.

What was Wali’s crime?

Kucha e aar ain Kaasi hai, Jogiya dilwahin’n ka baasi hai,

he declared.” (“My beloved belongs to the sacred Hindu city of Kashi, and that’s where my hermit heart is headed to seek its abode.”) It was the same cultural nationalism egged on by India’s new politico-corporate elite that vandalised the old grave of classical music guru Ustad Fayyaz Khan in Baroda.

Moyers, Moore and Maddow are the Most Influential Progressives - The three M's -- Bill Moyers, Michael Moore and Rachel Maddow -- scored highest in a recent AlterNet survey* asking more than 5,000 readers to rate the most influential progressive media figures. Moyers, who scored 67.5, and Moore, with a 66.2 score, were very close. Maddow was a tad behind at 63.5. Noam Chomsky, still the left's leading intellectual, placed fourth at 57.6, followed by Paul Krugman at 53.4. Krugman's incisive column in the New York Times has been a must-read for several years among a broad swath of liberals and progressives. The sixth-place slot was taken by Maddow's MSNBC cohort, Keith Olbermann (51.7), whose bombastic style, while certainly different than Rachel's, clearly has its fans. Next in line, and finishing off the top 10, were Amy Goodman (49.7), Arianna Huffington (49.4), Naomi Klein (47.7), and former Labor Secretary and Berkeley professor Robert Reich (31.1).